Dow Corning, a global leader in silicones, silicon-based technology and innovation and a wholly owned subsidiary of The Dow Chemical Company, continues to focus on driving innovation in healthcare through investments in state-of-the-art capabilities and new product technologies.
Dow Corning is growing its portfolio with new medical-grade silicone solutions, such as soft skin adhesives (SSAs) for optimising the patient experience with wearable devices. The company is also expanding its North American Healthcare Application Center in Midland, Michigan in the US with additional capabilities for characterising material performance to support advanced application development and help customers develop new innovations.
“Innovation in material technologies is essential to enable tomorrow’s medical breakthroughs, particularly novel skin-adhered diagnostic and therapeutic devices,” said Marie Crane, Healthcare marketing leader, Dow Corning. “Dow Corning continues to invest in both advanced silicone solutions and application development capabilities, which go hand-in-hand. By generating meaningful data related to material performance and processing, we can better help our customers gain a competitive advantage with the design and manufacture of new products that incorporate our medical grade silicon-based technologies.”
The company showcased its strongest soft skin adhesive to date, the Dow Corning MG 7-1010 Soft Skin Adhesive, in its booth at the 2017 Medical Design & Manufacturing (MD&M) West, the world’s largest annual medical technology event.
The new high-performance technology bridges the gap between the company’s high-adhesion pressure sensitive adhesives (PSAs) and gentle-adhesion SSAs to deliver strong attachment for today’s wearable medical devices. Peel adhesion tests on polycarbonate film show that this SSA provides more than double the adhesion force of the next strongest SSA in Dow Corning’s portfolio.
The Dow Corning MG 7-1010 Soft Skin Adhesive provides coating process flexibility because of the low viscosities of its two components; its primerless adhesion to substrates; and its suitability for direct- or transfer-coated manufacturing. Potential applications include wearable monitoring devices, wound care products, medical tape applications,and medical device attachments.
Dow Corning also featured a recently launched aqueous emulsion that can be used to lubricate medical devices and parenteral containers. The Dow Corning 366 35% Dimethicone NF Emulsion is formulated without parabens and octylphenyl ethoxylates (OPE) surfactant, which are substances of very high concern under the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) regulation. It is made with silicone that is compliant with dimethicone (NF) and dimethicone (Ph. Eur.) monographs.
The company has also significantly enhanced its Healthcare Application Center, located at the Dow Corning headquarters, with new metrology and molding equipment, notably a 60T injection moulding machine and dosing pump, stress/strain equipment and a conditioning chamber.
A large staff of engineers and chemists provide training, technical support, and testing to help customers in North America understand the properties of Dow Corning’s medical-grade silicone solutions and use them to design successful new products. These materials include the company’s liquid silicone rubber (LSR) and high consistency rubber (HCR) product lines, as well as its other silicone elastomers and adhesives for healthcare applications.
The centre routinely produces samples for material characterisation using various bio-qualification tests and is supported by global regulatory, stewardship and toxicology Dow Corning experts.
“Dow Corning continues to invest in infrastructure and capabilities that significantly benefit our healthcare customers,” said Roger Hendrick, industry specialist and application engineer, Dow Corning. “These major enhancements to our application centrewill yield data and knowledge that support product development. This initiative is a great example of our ongoing efforts to become a valuable ally for customers as they create the next generation of medical devices.”